To her, love and pain were synonymous. They both hurt, and she kept them both wrapped up in the folds of her heart, where they turned either frigid or searing, so that they crusted over, or made the surrounding heart erode and go rotten. The girl held it close, under all she had, so that that they soon became one, and the world could never see the cause of her slow decay into death.

And because the world never saw, more and more people succumed to the same fate.